Nobody’s risking much, in 2022, by assuming we’re living through the genesis of virtual production. There are enough high-profile productions happening to lend the technique some legitimacy, and while the surge in both interest and the provision of facilities makes it hard to say how demand and supply are matching up, activity is at fever pitch.
On one hand, film might seem dead. On the other, the last few months have seen a flurry of activity which is emblematic of a wider interest in the field that’s continued ever since the technology fell out of mainstream use. It’s been suggested that photochemical origination is settling into a new normal, and that’s not hard to substantiate.
Almost since photography has existed, people have pursued ways of modifying the picture after it’s been shot. The “dodge” and “burn” tools in Photoshop are widely understood as ways to make things brighter or darker, but it’s probably less widely understood that they refer to techniques for exposure control that date all the way back to the earliest days of darkroom image processing. Bring moving images into the mix and consistency becomes a big concern too. Individual still photographs might be part of a single exhibition, but they don’t have any concept of being cut together in a sequence.
Every TV viewer compares live content with what they regularly see on TV, with multimillion-dollar talent with more multimillions in technical equipment and support.
High quality lens design is a scientific art. In Part two of this four-part series, John Watkinson explains some of the issues involved in optics and camera lenses.
We are not done with statistics yet. In a sense we will never be done with it and it is better to know how to deal with it than to ignore it. It is better still to know how others commonly fail to deal with it and reach conclusions that cannot be justified. It is typically very hard to explain to people who do not understand.
Thus far we have looked at transforms from a somewhat abstract viewpoint. In contrast, here we look at an application where transforms take center stage.
Dealing with brightness in camera systems sounds simple. Increase the light going into the lens; increase the signal level coming out of the camera, and in turn increase the amount of light coming out of the display. In reality, it’s always been more complicated than that. Camera, display and postproduction technologies have been chasing each other for most of the last century, especially since a period in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when electronic cameras started to become good enough for serious single-camera drama work.